Stardate 1988
Coordinates: Pacifica, CA
Party at Tim Markowitz’s (aka Dolphin-boy)
This ranks among the craziest Animal House type parties that ever took place. At least in our small town, anyway. I’ve been to a few wild parties in my time and this one still stands out as the best and worst party ever. We were mostly juniors and seniors in high school, and Tim’s family had gone to Hawaii for a couple weeks. Now, Tim was a good kid, a straight-A “smack”, and could have been trusted to stay home alone. The original intention was to just have a few friends over…but word got spread around Terra Nova H.S. that there was going to be a Partius Majorus at his place. I think it took place on a Saturday night but it’s been a long time and I can’t remember the details all that well. There may be some factual errors in this story. Whitey, if you ever come across this post, feel free to correct me!
I figure between 150-200 kids must have shown up. They had a large three-story home which was well packed with people inside and outside in the backyard, too. Alcohol flowed freely…seem to recall those punch bowls filled with random liquor stolen from parents. Kegs. Plenty of green stuff to go around (hey it is the San Francisco area…what did you expect?). It seemed like everyone was well behaved at first, but within a few hours there was plenty of collateral damage. There was one fight; some stoner got punched in the nose by a jock and blood spattered on the wall like a Pollock painting. Flower pots were overturned and their water & soil nutrients got ground into the carpets. Blinds were ripped from the window frames. His parents had an elevated Jacuzzi tub in the master bath; it got filled to the point of overflowing and soaked the floor underneath. Someone clogged a toilet and that overflowed too. Students were throwing anything that wasn’t bolted down (garbage, toilet paper rolls that turned into streamers, etc) off the balcony and into the neighbor’s yards. The cops came out two or three times to try and break things up, the last time they paid us a visit I was hiding in the backyard bushes with other kids while Sergeant McGruff searched the house. Their flashlights bounced in the windows and scanned around the backyard looking for us delinquents. It was cold, damp, and foggy in Pedro Point (quarter mile from the ocean), as usual. They probably succeeded in shutting things down at that point. We were scared to come back inside for a while. It wound down in the wee hours of the morning, after the ruffians were expelled, then we all hung out Breakfast Club style and bullsh!tted for a while. We got maybe a couple hours of sleep by crashing on the floor.
The worst part was the aftermath. We were all hung over and our bodies were useless. I helped clean up the following day, but it was overwhelming. Probably five to ten true friends stuck around to help, but it was way too much for us kids to handle. I helped clean up the neighbor’s yards (that was the Walk of Shame) and hauled bags of trash and bottles to the recycling center (who remembers the Bat-mobile?). Rented a carpet cleaner, but it didn’t help much, we needed professional help. There were a few days left to get things in order before his parents got home, but there was only so much we could do to make the house presentable. Water damage to the floors was way beyond our capability to fix. The punishment? Tim had to pay his parents back for the repairs by doing various jobs around the house they assigned to him for about a year. I don’t recall seeing him for quite a while afterwards, he was pretty much grounded and doing that pay-back work all the time. Was it worth it? Sure, I suppose it was!
